Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life.

Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye.

I am often asked if I'm always happy, and I think it's important to distinguish between being happy and being in a good mood. At this very moment I'm actually in a pretty bad mood.

And at first I thought this is the worst time to record an episode, but I've always been really committed to being vulnerable with you,

honest and completely transparent in my books and online, so why should the podcast be any different?

I refuse to put on a facade that everything is always wonderful in Timberland, but I can be

honest with you about how I choose to deal with things when they're not ideal.

Today I had a falling out with one of my distributors and it turned ugly, at least by my standards.

After that relationship fell apart, I instinctively wanted to fall back into old patterns of adding insult to injury with guilty pleasures like pizza and fried food and YouTube.

It's a very interesting pattern. I used to always get a stomach ache from eating ice cream for example, so I made it a rule to only eat ice cream if my stomach was already hurting. I figured I might as well, it already hurts. Now I know to avoid

what gives me a stomach ache in the first place and have even found non-dary ice cream that doesn't

upset my stomach, so the problem was was solved but the option to make things

worse when they're already bad still calls out to me don't ask me why I don't know it

just this whole adding insult to injury thing that just seems it just

somehow makes sense. I don't know.

The beauty of mindfulness, however, is that it adds a gap between impulse and action. So the moment I hung up the phone with a distributor, they shall not be named, my mind raced with all the bench eating and watching that I can do and sulk and milk this bad attitude as long as possible.

When the mind is racing like that,

when meditation is the last thing you want to do,

that's exactly when meditation is very helpful. It reminds me at

least that I have options. I need to let go of some steam, yes but there are healthy

ways to do it and there are unhealthy ways to do it.

That gap is where I can navigate my life towards who I want to be and away from who I've been.

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